Monthly Archives: August 2017

Our next club is quite a large under taking, and we have spent months on this project. We had seen these extremely cute tanks from a company called Meng Models

and thought they would be perfect for our after school club, on the grounds that they would really appeal to the children, they are clip together so that helps us out a lot, and it seems they were designed for first time modellers in an attempt to get children interested in the hobby, which is basically what we are doing with our club, so it seemed the sensible next choice. One issue with the club is always cost of the kit, so in order to bring this down we found the local importer and ordered a large number at trade price with the funds from our table top sale, which also means they are within budget for the children.

The plan for our next club is to make and assemble the Sherman tanks which the children can keep, and we also have enough of the Shermans and some Tiger tanks for the school club to have a table top game with. We ordered enough for several groups of after school clubs. We will mention to the group that there are several other Cartoon style tank kits available from Meng Models if they wish to go out and buy their own, which to be honest, I think they will.

So far I have managed to assemble and paint the Tanks that we intend to use in the table top game. there will be 4 Tiger Tanks Vs 8 Shermans. I will be adding to this post once the club kicks off in September when we will begin to build the first Shermans with the group, so more Photos will follow.

I had spent some weeks collecting the figures from ebay, I went after the daleks but also managed to get quite a sizeable amounts of other alien races, like Cybermen and Sontarans. All these figures were issued free sometime ago with the Childrens Comic “Dr Who Adventures” and were roughly 28mm ish, (enough for me to consider an army or two of Daleks for myself. )

Dr Who figures (11th and 12th ) are from the now long defunct range from Crooked Dice, the Doctor has at least one regeneration if he comes a cropper!

After an epic amount of painting I had managed to get together two dalek armies and still have some left for the children to keep for themselves.

I also managed to paint and convert hundreds more figures for selling at the summer fayre to rise more funds for the club, but more about that later……

Some shots of the battlefield, we used a street in other games, sadly no photos of that!

Here is our Summer fayre stall to raise club funds

This is another good way to raise funds and buy stuff for the club

some of the conversions for sale!

We also ran a participation game with the help of some of the club members

All the Daleks and other aliens were sold and we raised enough funds for our next project.

We thought we would combine a year group topic of the Romans with some table top gaming for our next club.

Again the figures were some that both Jeremy or myself had spare, plus lots of donated bits from my friends, we had enough for a little Roman army, a hoard of Celts/Britons and some left over for the Children to paint and take home, we had some books by Osprey as reference especially their excellent “Roman legionary 58BC – 69AD”

We modified the St Crispin Day rule set and scaled down the units to just 3 Romans.

The Romans stood little chance with both Boudicca and Asterix the Gaul against them

After the airfix models we decided that we wanted to do more gaming and less model making and painting…….(although both the headmaster (Jeremy) and myself had to spend our summer painting an army each)

The Perry Twins had very kindly donated several boxes of their excellent plastic medieval figures to the school. We divided up the figures into two armies and made sure we had some figures left over to give to the children, which they painted and took home.

We had also been given a great set of rules called St Crispins Day by one of my friends Al, who had used them at a demonstration game at the Leeds armouries.

Each child was in charge of 9 figures in groups of 3, unless they controlled cavalry, then their retinue was only 3 mounted Knights.

We had several excellent games with these figures on a 4x6foot battle field over the next 20 weeks with 2 different club groups.

We ordered some Spitfires for our next set of 10 weeks, then for the next some Bf 109Es The hope being that once the models were assembled and painted we could have a table top battle with some basic rules. The children had been studying WW2 so knew some information about the Battle of Britain. We started with a little talk about what we would be making and a bit of back ground history, which often involves some books or watching some clips on “youtube” and often bringing in our own models to show them. Then it was down to business.

Spitfire Table

BF 109 table

Display models as reference.

Once complete we use plastic cups as flight stands and have a table top battle, this is the 109 flying circus, some of the children kept to the basic camouflage, and others liked to do their own thing which is fine, its about having fun.

My wife is a teacher in a first school and I often have to help out making models and doing various arty things for her displays and topics, so it seemed like a natural move to do an after school club that revolved around model making or gaming.

So, about 3 years ago I started a model club which I co run with the headmaster Jeremy. We wanted to try and give the kids of year 3 and 4 a chance to experience model making and trying to bring in some new recruits to our hobby, and give them something else to do and think about apart from their phones!

One of the main issues with an after school club is funding it, models are expensive and children can’t really afford to bring in much more than £4 for their club subs, and that might cover a 10 week period.

A good place to start is Airfix, we knew they had some offers on for schools so we checked out their website and found that we could order enough WW1 British Mk 1 Tanks to start a club of around 10 or 12. the offer included some paint and brushes which really helped and some glue…..and it was all within budget.

I decided to add a little display base for the model to show some them some basic basing techniques.

After several weeks of construction, the fun started with the painting, especially the camouflage! The bases took several days to dry and did have a lot in common with the gloopy conditions in the trenches.

I failed to take a group shot of the models, which is a bit disappointing.

Overall we felt the WW1 tanks were a bit tricky for the children to start with, so for our next group we moved onto Aircraft.